Engine Marketing Phoenix: Yahoo Announces Ad Migration Deadline

Yahoo’s Search Marketing Blog recently announced that their adCenter transition will begin on Monday, October 11, 2010. This is sure to affect practitioners of search engine marketing in Phoenix. Starting on October 11 you may start seeing less clicks, costs and impressions reported in Yahoo’s Search Marketing console.

If you have an adCenter account, you will most likely see an increase in clicks, costs and impressions on the Microsoft adCenter side. This will not come as a surprise to most but it is simply a reminder to expect these changes after Monday, October 11.

Yahoo announced that users have until October 25, 2010 to complete their transition from Yahoo to Microsoft to ensure that their ads will continue to run on Yahoo’s Search interface. Yahoo stated, “make sure that you have an adCenter account in place—complete with campaigns and budget—no later than October 25. Otherwise, your ads will no longer be displayed on the Yahoo! Search network.”

Yahoo has received criticism from practitioners of search engine marketing in Phoenix for forcing this transition. The reason being is that if you ask Yahoo why search engine users should visit Yahoo as opposed to Bing if Bing powers Yahoo’s search result, Yahoo would state that they provide a much different and better user interface than Bing.

Practitioners of Search engine marketing in Phoenix believe that if Yahoo has such a unique user interface, then advertisers should be able to differentiate ad campaigns between Yahoo and Bing. These advertisers would certainly benefit from showing different landing pages and ad copy as well as targeting different keywords for Yahoo and Bing searchers. Despite the criticism, Yahoo plans to complete the transition by October 25, 2010.